" Don't Think Twice It's Alright "
“Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard… She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness—a Rodin sculpture come to life.”
– Bob Dylan
“Bob was charismatic: he was a beacon, a lighthouse, he was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself. … I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed. I was unable to find solid ground. I was on quicksand and very vulnerable.”
– Suze Rotolo
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"The last great song on Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. The first track on the second side, it could almost actually be the best thing on the whole album (it’s not, but it’s close), which is saying quite a lot. Dylan will go on to write a whole raft of break-up songs, but this is the template for all the rest of them. These are the cool lyrics, with an undercurrent of hurt, and with the false veneer that says ‘nothing really bothers me’. This is the kind of song that most people wish they could sing when they getting dumped, but few of them actually can.In the summer of 1963 Dylan was seeing both Joan Baez and Suze Rotolo (his longtime on-again off-again girlfriend who is hugging his arm on the cover of Freewheelin’). Baez performed this song during her set at the Newport Folk Festival, and introduced it, with Rotolo in the audience, thusly: “Here’s another Bobby song. This is a song about a love affair that has lasted too long”. Rotolo, of course, walked out."
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